We are doing Sensation and Perception. While handing out the work to students I overheard one student say to another, "Isn't perception what happens to women when they give birth?" This is what happens when you let a good public school education go to waste. As Kwame Dawes pointed out in his lecture the other weekend when he was here in Ottawa, Damion Marley's lyrics to Welcome to Jamrock address this,
Come on let's face it, a ghetto education's basic
And most a the youths dem waste it
And when they waste it, that's when dem mek the guns replace it
Then dem don't stand a chance at all
This young lady unfortunately doesn't have a gun to replace her lack of knowledge/understanding but it makes you wonder what she will replace it with because she will replace it with something. What am I doing as a teacher? I have had this student on two previous occassions. She managed to pass one and fail one. She is no closer to graduating then she was when I first had her in grade nine but I find it distrubing that she has been able to progress this far. Now just because she doesn't know the difference between "perception" and "conception" doesn't mean all hope is lost but you have to ask yourself, what the hell does she know?
She has fallen so far behind in the education process that she is no longer functioning with the confidence to even get through high school. How do we rescue students like this? How do we create an education system that is full of empowering experiences for all students versus what we do now -- a series of irrelevant or unrelated experiences that allow students to accumulate credits.
